Since we love stories .. As a child my cousin had a degenerating eye disease that was estimated to leave her blind in her youth. Doctors had no treatment. She wore coke-bottle lenses and her eyes were kind of crossed. My aunt, out of desperation I'm sure, took her to a local church for a "prayer healing session" and within moments of "laying hands", the glasses came off, she had 20/20, and now in her 50's she has not needed corrective lenses since. Her entire family was converted on the spot. My aunt became a minister and my cousins are strong christians to this day, whereas prior there was no religious background, more like the opposite I'd say. I have a few stories like this as my folks were sucked into the "born-again movement" back in the mid-70's.

I was young myself at the time else I would know more specifics about my cousins condition, but seeing how Alex didn't really have specific details in his story, I guess the story is okay.

Apparent instantaneous restoration of the crippled, diseased, and ill does seem quite fascinating.

A little bitterness does arise in me about this as I have seen enough "healing practitioners" to have removed my doubts of such. The most offensive I saw (homeopath) required a credit card before first appointment, no exceptions. If she dispensed 2 pills as a "special remedy" that was not carried online or in a health-food store, she charged boohoo bucks for them. At the time I was severely disabled from injuries and unable to work, racking up intense debt. She could have cared less. I still have near $750 worth of remedies she prescribed for me during a 4 month period sitting in a tub (because it's not like antibiotics, you don't take the entire container). I used to have thoughts about opening my own pharmacy with the ridiculous amount of "remedies" that accumulated.

That said, there was a notable other who was quite humble and sweet about payment. I always paid her what she asked because she was so kind about it, and her charges were lower than the rest.

I am very glad if somebody gets healed by remote healing and I don't think such healing is impossible. But the theoretical foundations of Bernadette Doran's healing methods are not valid.

Konstantin Korotkov is much more a businessman than a researcher. I have studied his Kirlian photography method a lot and have discussed with him personally and even hosted a supper for him and his wife when they visited Finland after our invitation. He has said that his Kirlian method has a very good diagnostic accuracy because he has a big reference database of Kirlian photographs and normally diagnosed cases of illness cases. As a matter of fact such a database does not exist.

I have always wondered how well Korotkov is treated in the material found in Google searches in English. I don't love skeptics, but now and then even they can be right in some details. The following blog item is not too fraudulent although it naturally is rather lopsided:

As a point of clarification, Korotkov's work does not provide the theoretical foundations of Bernadette Doran's healing for at least two reasons. First, there are no theoretical foundations for Bernadette's healing; at best there may be some vague ideas that differ from person to person but nothing that rises to the level of a theory. Second, she uses energy healing methods that have nothing to do with Korotkov for the actual healing, particularly Bill Bengston's method. She says she uses Korotkov's method, not to heal, but to help detect health problems (not diagnose, per se).

You assert the data base does not exist. In the interview, Bernadette said it does. This seems an easily resolved dispute.

As a point of clarification, Korotkov's work does not provide the theoretical foundations of Bernadette Doran's healing for at least two reasons. First, there are no theoretical foundations for Bernadette's healing; at best there may be some vague ideas that differ from person to person but nothing that rises to the level of a theory. Second, she uses energy healing methods that have nothing to do with Korotkov for the actual healing, particularly Bill Bengston's method. She says she uses Korotkov's method, not to heal, but to help detect health problems (not diagnose, per se).

Yes, if Bernadette or somebody else has that database for her use, then I was wrong. If Korotkov has given only simple correlations between the sectors of the aura and different parts of the body, that is not the database. Those correlations ought to have been developed using the database.

For many years ago I read a Russian article (in Russian language) about an investigator visiting Korotkov's laboratory. He wrote that it would have been impossible for Korotkov to get such a database. Unfortunately I don't have the link left, it is gone with one of my computers.

I have the book "Dr. Konstantin Korotkov: Aura and consciousness". There he writes (p. 74):

Sector diagnostics

The evaluation of the sectors and their comparison with particular organs and systems is based both on the system of meridians, and on the Su-Jock system developed by the Korean Professor Park.

Sciborg_S_Patel

Talked to my cousin about some of this stuff as he's an oncologist. He was rather honest, saying that he advises patients what can interfere with their treatment but otherwise doesn't try to proselytize materialism. He noted that the very fact that so much of medical research uses statistics is an indicator of how little we actually know about how the body works, and he agreed that the hunger to publish and profit had skewed some of medical research.

All that said, we agreed that medical science done right was the best approach to the complex problems of the human body but it could try to open its perspective more without accepting any crazy thing that comes along.

Animistic perspectives, which hold the cosmos as “a being to whom prayers and offerings are made, who is endowed with understanding, agency and sentience, and responds to the actions of humans” are often dismissed as primitive, even as “incompatible with an impersonal regard of objective reality.” Yet this account of a healing of chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (the consequence of severe rattlesnake envenomation), within the shamanic traditions of the Native American Church and the vegetalistas of the Peruvian Amazon, reminds us of how profound healing can be when it arises from indigenous perception of a sentient, living cosmos. It also demonstrates the diagnostic and healing capacities of shamanic traditions utilizing psychoactive plants, capacities sometimes beyond the reach of Western science.

Recent failures of clinical trials of novel analgesics designed to treat neuropathic pain have led to much speculation about the underlying reasons. One oft-discussed possibility is that the placebo response in these trials has increased in recent years, leading to lower separation between the drug and placebo arms. Whether this has indeed occurred has not yet been adequately addressed. Here, we extracted data from published randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of drugs for the treatment of chronic neuropathic pain over the years 1990-2013. We find that placebo responses have increased considerably over this period, but drug responses have remained stable, leading to diminished treatment advantage. This trend has been driven by studies conducted in the U.S.A. Consideration of participant and study characteristics revealed that in the U.S.A. but not elsewhere, RCTs have increased in study size and length. These changes are associated with larger placebo response. Analysis of individual RCT time courses showed different kinetics for the treatment versus placebo responses, with the former evolving more quickly than the latter and plateauing, such that maximum treatment advantage was achieved within 4 weeks.​

Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday vetoed legislation that would have allowed terminally ill people in California to petition pharmaceutical companies for access to experimental drugs before they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

The so-called “right-to-try” legislation had gained support in more than a dozen states, and it sailed through the California Legislature with nearly unanimous support.